New toy 2

As you may know, I have been on a minor quest for a new 6-string guitar.  As in, I've been looking at guitars for a couple of years, trying to find one that felt right, but I haven't been pursuing it obsessively.

This past weekend at ConClave, Barry Childs-Helton had a Tacoma Road King RM6C which he allowed me to play.  This is an American made solid wood guitar, with some unusual construction features including a bolt-on neck, a small offset soundhole, somewhat unusual bracing, and a curved bridge which is heavier at the bass end than the treble, all of which give it really powerful bass response without losing the high end.

I liked it.  I can't remember Barry's exact words, but he said something to the effect of "I can recognize a man in love when I see it."  As I said at the time, it's the first guitar I'd tried since I started looking that spoke to me without saying "I cost way more than you can afford".

My local guitar store had one on the shelf.  The truss rod was out of adjustment and the strings were so old they were rusty, but even so it felt good.  And at $750 including case, strap, strings, and sales tax, I could live with the price.  So I bought it.

( Pictures and more behind the cut )

I've never named one of my instruments before, but I think this one may be Tiger.  You'll get to meet him at OVFF.

Lunar Eclipse

Here I am staying up too late playing with pictures again.  I don't have the right equipment forastronomical pictures, but I have a camera and the clouds actually broke up (though it's foggy).  So here are a couple of pictures of the eclipse, one while it was still total and the other a few minutes later as the moon started to show through. I fiddled with the brightness, but not the color. Taken at 1/6 of a second, ISO 1600, 300mm f/6.3 lens, braced against my car because I don't own a tripod. Good pictures need a much longer exposure, for which I'd need a tripod. If I hadn't believed the cloudy weather forecast, I might have thought to borrow my mom's, but that didn't occur to me until too late.



( Second picture cut to not be annoying to your friends page )